Hitman Episode 2 Finally Gets A Release Date

IO Interactive and Square Enix will roll out the next episode of the Hitman reboot on April 26 on the PS4, Xbox One and PC. The second episode takes Agent 47 to the coastal town of Sapienza, a fictional location off the shores of Italy.

IGN rolled out the news along with the new teaser trailer that Square Enix let loose, which is literally nothing more than 11 seconds of just a screen with the release date.

While the teaser trailer doesn't say much, previous trailers gave gamers a nice fly-through and almost tourist-like look at the places of interest that gamers might find useful in their killtacular endeavors.

Sapienza is nothing like the Paris mission in the first episode of Hitman. It's still quite large, but set within an open-world sandbox where the city is your playpen. The idea is that you can use various buildings, hilltops, churches, towers and verandas as possible locations to take out the target and his henchmen. In older trailers, IO Interactive revealed how spacious and yet how seclusive the Sapienza town is.

You can move around through the streets and alleyways rather effortlessly, but there are enough crevices and corners scattered throughout the city that it's possible to easily take down a target without anyone ever seeing...or knowing.

It's hard to think of an equivalent map in previous Hitman titles that had such expanse and diversity of gameplay options. While the trailers and screenshots for Sapienza have been rather limited, we managed to see a sprawling city with a lot of ins, outs and pathways made available for players to plot a rather elaborate hit and then make an equally elaborate getaway.

It's a little frustrating because the Sapienza map in the second episode of Hitman seems to be setup the way a lot of people wanted the assassinations to be setup in Assassin's Creed. At least IO Interactive is getting the stealth and AI right. A lot of gamers – despite their protests about an episodic release of an AAA title – still really enjoyed the first episode of the 2016 reboot of Hitman. Nestled in between downvotes over the DRM – and 0/10 user review scores for Square breaking up the release of the game – are some people who enjoy the smooth controls, responsive mechanics, interactive environments and sometimes challenging AI.

Hopefully for the second episode, IO and Square will scale back on the DRM for the PC version of the release and focus more on ensuring that the game works as opposed to investing so much of their efforts into keeping legitimate customers from enjoying the experience they paid for.

You can look for episode 2 to go live starting April 26 on the Xbox One, PS4 and PC. Alternatively, you can buy Hitman's entire six episode saga in physical disc format starting early 2017 for $59.99.